"within this hopeful word an idea hides in plain sight: For something to be reborn, it must have first died... The hurricane lives in a complicated place. Everyone's experience is both communal and personal, obvious and hidden. The memory of the death is everywhere, buried in shallow and temporary graves...
ALL NEW ORLEANIANS can describe three moments from the past 10 years in cinematic detail: their escape from the storm, where they were when Gleason blocked that punt and where they were when the Saints won the Super Bowl. These are the tentpoles of biography since Katrina, and in telling them, people reveal their most unguarded selves. Like a love of the Saints, this is one of the few things in the city to bridge all the deep race and class divides: Everyone suffered through the storm; everyone cried when Gleason blocked the punt; and everyone still struggles to express the emotions they felt when the Saints won in Miami...
"What everybody lost," he says, "was the stuff in the back of their closets, and shoe boxes full of photographs. You know, your letters from your uncle who served in Vietnam, or the awards you won when you were a child. There are people in this town who don't have photographs of their grandparents. It wasn't about couches and TVs and automobiles and Sheetrock. It was about your history being taken away from you. You don't have photographs, the images, the words, the awards, report cards, letters, mostly letters. Diaries. Imagine how much unpublished music was destroyed in that storm."...
Rose, a native of Maryland, came here to work, and like many transplants, he cannot imagine a life anywhere else. The place has swallowed him, and on the stage, he finds his pace and rhythm. "The most important four-letter word in the English language is not love. It is home. Home, where the senses are filled with the comforting. Where the streets, the accents and the church bells are familiar. Where the air smells like coffee, sweet olive, fish fry, mule piss and sex."
Everyone in the crowd laughs.
He smiles, hoping this is the start of a future, not a nostalgia trip to a past forever gone. His letter is poignant, funny and sweet, and a common idea flows through every line. The hurricane isn't something that happened a decade ago. It's something that is still happening, good and bad. The anniversary isn't a commemoration of the past but a civic prayer that the city's longest day might finally come to an end...
People call New Orleans a Catholic city, but that's not really true, not anymore. With every census, the percentage of practicing Roman Catholics declines. The religious iconography laid over the rise of a football team would have been considered blasphemous a generation ago, and maybe even for this generation, had the people in New Orleans not needed to believe in something so desperately. The public institution that has replaced the church's ubiquity is the Saints, and so, "Amen," the headline writers decided -- the most beautiful and surprising gift for a city stripped of its faith: an answered prayer...
Ten years after the flood of '27, the local papers did not run a single anniversary story. Anniversaries are a modern invention, as is the idea of holding on to one New Orleans instead of just embracing whatever rises in its place. Katrina lives, and so does the New New Orleans, until another agent of change comes to erase them both.
The only television show to ever really get the city, David Simon's "Treme," revolved around a theme common to Simon's work: People in urban America aren't Shakespearean characters with free will but actors in a Greek tragedy, all subject to the whims of postmodern gods: cops, mayors, schools, newspapers, oil company CEOs -- and in New Orleans two more, Rebirth and Recovery, the most powerful local gods of all. They bless some lives, curse many others, controlling the future of people who are rebuilding what was taken away...
From the club's parking lot, he sees some young white kids in polo shirts and khaki shorts, waiting between the clubhouse and the putting tee. Phips is sure they know every lyric on "Tha Carter III" but have no idea Lil Wayne grew up in the neighborhood on the other side of the fence, the green shade blocking the poor kids from seeing in and the rich kids from seeing out...
The market sells things rich people like -- expensive balsamic vinegar, Negronis, fusion Korean food -- and for someone who lived in the city before Katrina, the sheer number of white people walking around this stretch of St. Claude is disorienting. One night, at a rap/funk show at a bar a few blocks away, a political black-nationalist rapper performs for a mostly white crowd in a place that sells "artisanal popsicles." Later a jam band noodles and solos over a sampled Malcolm X speech. It's just a whiter city than before. You see white people in places they never used to go, which the people who live in those places notice too.
The white population has grown, while the overall population has shrunk by more than 100,000 people, almost all of them black. More than half of the black males in the city don't have work. More than half of black male ninth-graders fail to graduate from high school on time. There are few jobs and fewer places to live -- none of the city's housing projects was seriously damaged in the storm, but all of them have since been torn down, which opened up the valuable real estate trapped beneath them. One study says there are now 3,221 fewer low-income units than before the storm. In 2005, a two-bedroom apartment averaged $676 a month. Now it averages $950. The city didn't replace the public housing units one-for-one, so poor citizens are being pushed toward the outskirts of town. The crime in suburban neighborhoods, like New Orleans East, is exploding. There are shootings and stabbings night after night...
THE PARTS OF the city falling further behind were in trouble long before Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas. New Orleans is one of many American cities that rely on tourism and sales tax to support themselves. To survive, New Orleans needs mega-events and massive entertainment districts, and an aggressive police presence in places where consumers gather. Sociologists describe this as post-Fordism, the economy of a place after the death of manufacturing jobs. The new focus divides a community into consumers and criminals. Most post-Fordism economies see a rise in zero-tolerance policing and incarceration rates... The jobs available didn't pay to build a middle-class life. The city needed its black people to shuck oysters and pour drinks but chased them back to the Iberville on horseback at the slightest provocation...
"You look great," Sanchez says when they're alone.
"It's dark," Rose says."...
The citizens in New Orleans, generation after generation, have chosen hope and joy in the face of disaster and oppression. Everything unique about the city is a reflection of that choice. They choose to spend a year making a suit of brightly colored feathers to dance for one glorious day. They choose strong coffee and fried fish. They choose Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest. They choose to eat gumbo in white linen suits because fuck it. They choose music."
http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/13479768/wright-thompson-life-loss-renewal-new-orleans-10-years-hurricane-katrina
This was tremendous and enveloping. There was a lot of showing-not-telling, a lot of moments where I tried to imagine what it would be like to inhabit the scenes described, that communicated a lot of intangibles about New Orleans and the impacts of Hurricane Katrina.
(Credit to KM)
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